Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire

6 GBP

Natalie Czech. Motto Books 2014

For the series “Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire” Natalie Czech invited eight writers – Vanessa Desclaux, Mara Genschel, April Elizabeth Lamm, Ashkan Sepahvand, Oliver Tepel, Jacques Roubaud, Amilcar Packer, and Vincenzo Latronico – to each write a text that contains the same calligram by the French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 – 1918). Each text is written in the mother tongue of each author (French, German, English, Portugese, Italian). The texts were precisely composed around the calligram, so as to embed it in their very fabric, and thus dissolve its iconicity. Natalie Czech presents these texts as photographs of book pages and re-presents the calligram by marking its component words in the photographs with acrylic paint.